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Next stop, prime factorization

Judging from my web server logs, I’ve achieved infinitesimally minor fame by being enshrined in the gallery of stupid XSL tricks for my square root nonsense. Recently, some guy emailed me:

Bob,

I don't know if you are still interested in a set of XSL stylesheets for standard math functions but I wrote several before I found the exslt.org website. I have: Square Root (similar to yours), Log, Log base 10 (calls Log), Sin, Cos.

Bruce

I bow before superior XSL greatness.

Aside: Does paid LJ have some decent search-my-own facility? I find myself having to grep backups from time to time since Google doesn’t index many of my entries.

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Kitchen

Yesterday I went to IKEA and bought a new set of cabinets (Adel medium brown, with rockdots over the a) for my kitchen for the cost of a couple of computers. And so begins the glorious kitchen remodeling process. Subject to budget of course, but I’m considering Pergo flooring and new appliances and all that. Now the anxiety over whether I picked the right cabinets is beginning to set in. Oh well, anything is better than what I had before. If anyone wishes to weigh in on wall/floor/countertop/appliance colors, or can recommend a local installer to put it all together, I’m all ears. The cabinets are a somewhat cherry color.

After the IKEA trip, since Angeline happened to call, and since I was already halfway to Baltimore, we met up for dinner. Ah, dinner with the ex. But it was nice and not too awkward. I’ve had better meals at the Cheesecake Factory than the blackened chicken pasta, but their cheesecake cannot be denied.

I received in the mail this week a copy of the Codetalkers show I had blogged about earlier. I received the copy by way of B&P; that is, I found a guy who taped it and sent him blanks (B) and return postage (P), and he sent me back the CDs with the songs on it. A great recording. At some point I’ll upload it to archive.org so all peoples of the world may enjoy it.

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Star Wars

I saw Episode 3 last night at the local Gigantiplex where they had ten midnight showings. It was good. The Cinema Delux did a nice job of crowd control by seating everyone hours before the movie started, so there was no pesky waiting in line.

As for the movie itself: it works pretty well. The top notch action scenes (finally CG doesn’t look totally fake) more than make up for the trademark Lucasian horrible dialog. However, is it me or does Vader look like a second-tier late-night local cable wrestling persona? Maybe he just isn’t as scary to me now as he was when I was a kid.

There were a bunch of Obi-Wans and Leias (or Padmes?) in the audience, a yoda or two, and a Vader. I dressed as nothing. Best costume of the night was Napoleon Dynamite who even did The Dance in front of everyone in the theater.

Sleepy.

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V=IR, A Cautionary Tale

My Marshall amp has been sitting unused for a long time because it doesn’t make any noise. Recently I’ve been wanting to get it going again so that I can play electric guitar from my couch instead of walking all the way downstairs (i.e. ten feet). Any old amp will do this task as I can use my POD for effects. But I have the Marshall so why not put it to use? Incidentally, I can just connect the speakers directly to the POD’s headphone amp, but that’s no fun.

Vacuum tubes are notorious for being flakey, so I figured a new set of tubes might make it work again. I ordered a new set, plugged em in, no go. The power tubes heat up but the preamp tubes do nothing. That’s about the extent of my expertise on amplifier repair, so the only other thing I can do is open it up and look for cold solder joints or blown fuses. Alas, I found nothing obvious when I did this.

Working on any high power AC gear is dangerous. In fact, today while discussing my broken amp with a coworker, I said that despite my many hours logged in EE labs in school, I was not at all comfortable working on it myself. Perhaps I should have listened to me.

I was smart enough to unplug the amp, and careful enough to keep a hand in a pocket. But still, I was sloppy when putting it back together and managed to discharge a high voltage cap with my fingers. Holy hell that hurts! I dropped back a couple of feet and let out a loud scream. Youch. I will not be doing that again anytime soon. Luckily, I don’t have any permanent damage: I got a tiny electrical burn on my middle finger (that probably would be worse if I didn’t already have a half-inch callus on it from playing guitar). And I earned a healthy fear of high powered electronics.

So, people of the internet, don’t do what Donny Don’t does. Discharge those caps!

You pretty much have to buy vacuum tubes from the third world or eastern bloc these days since they aren’t much in demand over here. The ones I bought were all Sovteks. I love the Soviet iconography on the box:

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Symet

Saturday, I deconstructed a broken CD-ROM to make a toy. This is essentially a so-called “symet,” which is the simplest device in the BEAM robotics world. Usually, they are made with solar cells and the accompanying logic, but as I don’t have any of those, I just used a AA battery. One battery, a motor pilfered from the aforementioned CD player, and some vacuum tubes glued on for balance (they serve no electrical purpose; I just had them sitting around and they look cool). Pretty simple but more fun than a box of Transformers. Possibly.

This is what the inside of a 1st gen CD-ROM looks like:

This is what the inside of my MP3 player looks like:

I spent a few hours yesterday doing the house-wiring thing. Again. I’m running cable for HDTV from my attic to my living room. Therefore I have little pink bits of fiberglass insulation everywhere. I have the cable running the whole distance to the TV but I had to stop short of getting it actually into the living room. It appears that I will need to reopen the hole in the wall from last time to drill a new hole through the stud to let the cable up from the crawl space. And then patch and repaint. Why am I doing this again?

In the district the other day I saw a jeep with spinners on the spare. Awesome, dude! I bet that guy has 20″ rims if-you-know-what-I-mean.

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Weekend

Saturday I walked the perimeter of East Potomac park. This is a long, smelly, dirty walk. As the park is given to flooding, there was all kinds of nice flotsam along the way: dead fish, tree branches, snack food wrappers, and many empty bait containers. Dozens of people were spending the afternoon fishing the Anacostia and Potomac. I hope this was entirely for fun and that no one actually ate the living containers of pollution. For all of it’s lack of charm, there are a few worthwhile sights: the Awakening sculpture, the meeting of the Anacostia and Potomac, seeing the Wilson bridge and the masonic temple off in the distance, watching planes take off from National, Georgetown in silhouette against the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial.

My original plan was to go geocaching in downtown DC. This is where you are given GPS coordinates and have to find something hidden there. But I don’t have a GPS unit and couldn’t lock on to a wireless AP from the Mall. Oh well. Anyway, any group that borrows terminology from Harry Potter (non-cachers are called ‘muggles’) is automatically lame.

Sunday was a trip to IKEA where I finally solved my bedding issues. There you buy a cover for a quilt and the stuffing separately, so you can get nearly any shade. Of course, it costs just as much as a normal comforter but they do have dark blue so who am I to complain. I did not eat the food.

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Pulse

As a consumer of all types of liquids sold by heartless multinationals, I discovered this week that a plastic Evian bottle cap mates perfectly with a Coke bottle cap to make a little enclosure. It occurred to me immediately, nerd that I am, that this would make a good project box for any really small electronics project. Not having any such projects in mind, I decided I would make something simple and useless, and what’s more useless than a flashing LED?

The circuit for a blinking light is pretty straightforward – it’s just a timer chip with an LED on the output. Except for the batteries (I used two 3V watch batteries taped together), I happened to have all the parts on hand: a 555 Timer chip (from a red box that I never built), 3 resistors, a capacitor, an LED, wires and some perfboard. This site has more info if you want to build your own. I just picked my own combination of resistors and cap that had a frequency around 2 Hz, then proceeded to do one of the worst soldering jobs ever, then cut up the perfboard so that it fits nice and snug inside the bottle cap. Now, I think it is time to listen to some Floyd.

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Beyond

The high point of last weekend for me was buying new bedding to match my new girly blue walls. I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond, located one of the two navy blue comforters ever made (for a price that reflects its rarity), along with a set of equally expensive 350 thread count sheets. Seriously, is it so hard to manufacture a plain blue comforter? I visited several stores, and there were only three such comforters to choose from: one was jersey knit (out), another had a satin sheen (out). If you want one with flowers or paisley crap all over it, you have it made. The third blue one, yes this is the one I bought, and I was sure it was perfect: solid navy blue color, no frills. Until I got it home and pulled it out to discover that it was adorned with bows. Bows! Back into the bag you go.

Last night I took it back to the BB&B. The lady at the exchange desk asked if anything was wrong. “No, it just has bows on it,” I said. That got a laugh. What I meant to say was that I’m on to BB&B’s plot of mass emasculation, but that’s another battle for another time. The sheets though, they are really nice.

I require a vacation this year to some area of limitless sun, such as the Carribean, Mexico, or South America. Anyone interested? Ryan, Dave, Len?

Speaking of Mexico, today is that day of celebration of dubious Mexican history. My plans? Go home, watch a DVD, drink a bottle of Cuervo. It’s good for you.

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Brains

A recent purchase from the buy-two-get-one-free table at Borders, I can’t decide if The Zombie Survival Guide is bizarrely funny, or just bizarre. It does at least nicely complement a viewing of Shaun of the Dead, though.